Frontline is a presentation of the Documentary Consortium.
While America continues to celebrate the stunning victory of Operation Desert Storm,
the people of Iraq continue to suffer.
Even when war is easy, the peace can be very hard.
Tonight on Frontline, a year before Operation Desert Storm,
the Pentagon tested its doctrine of overwhelming force in the invasion of Panama.
The footage you're looking at covers what remains of the Comandancia.
But today, after more than a year of democracy,
Panama is still plagued by the same problems that led to the invasion.
The information that I have is that there is more drug trafficking and more money laundering now than under Norway.
Tonight, War and Peace in Panama.
With funding provided by the financial support of viewers like you
and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
this is Frontline.
Panama City, October 3rd, 1989.
At 8 a.m., rebel members of the Panamanian Defense Forces took control of the Comandancia,
the headquarters of General Manuel Antonio Noriega.
Overhead, U.S. helicopters watched the unfolding action,
while U.S. commanders blocked some roads to prevent Noriega loyalists from coming to his rescue.
By 9 a.m., the rebels controlled the Comandancia,
and a camera caught General Noriega being escorted from his office.
For nearly two years, Noriega had been an acute embarrassment to the U.S. government.
The Justice Department had indicted him on drug smuggling and money laundering charges in 1988.
But every effort by two U.S. presidents, from economic sanctions to negotiations, had failed to convince Noriega to step down.
When the dictator nullified the free election of a new Panamanian government
and his dignity battalions brutally beat the opposition candidates,
President Bush openly encouraged the Panamanian Defense Forces to overthrow Noriega.
We'd love to see him get him out. We'd like to see him out of there.
But now, with a coup in progress, the administration was surprisingly unprepared.
We halfway supported the coup attempt. We brought in helicopters overhead,
but we didn't really go that extra mile to see that it actually happened.
Doug Waller is a Pentagon correspondent for Newsweek magazine.
Advisors around the president were very cautious about the coup plotters,
didn't know whether they were for real, didn't know if they were going to be,
if this was just a trap for the Americans to fall into.
So they held back.
By one o'clock, more Panamanian Defense Forces arrived to take control of the Comandancia.
Noriega had talked the rebel leaders into putting down their arms,
and five hours after it began, the coup had failed.
Noriega resumed command of his forces, and that night he ordered the execution of several of the rebels.
Little, if anything, was done to seize the moment.
Instead, uncertainty prevailed. No actions were taken to assist the people of Panama in the coup attempt to fail.
The intelligence has not been adequate. The strategy has not been adequate.
The contingency plans have not been in place.
Newsweek's cover story on the failed coup seemed to say it all.
There was a real feeling in the Congress, I think, and throughout certainly Washington and maybe the rest of the country,
that here we had the first crisis and the administration had really blundered.
There was one moment on that morning of the coup attempt when Bush believed that Noriega was in custody.
They were discussing how they would move him, what they would do, what role was the United States going to play,
when a middle-level aide wandered into the Oval Office to say, no, it's all over. The coup has completely failed.
The next day, Secretary of State James Baker was called before a Senate committee to defend the administration's actions.
The United States retains the option to use American forces. That option has never been ruled out.
But if you're going to risk American lives, Mr. Chairman, it's the President's view that you do so on your own timetable,
you do so based on your own plans, at a time of maximum opportunity and advantage, and you don't do so on the basis of someone else's plans.
General Colin Powell had just been installed as the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
and he ordered a reexamination of the military's contingency plans for Panama.
Those plans call for a very gradual buildup of U.S. forces.
Retired Marine General Bernard Treanor is now a military analyst.
The plan which later became known as Just Cause, which was used in the invasion of Panama,
was built on the premise that we would move in by surprise with overwhelming force very rapidly
and put end to any problems in Panama in quick order.
In Panama, the U.S. military built up its forces, and it also began to intensely rehearse the new invasion plan,
a plan that would require it to hit dozens of targets simultaneously, if and when the President gave the order.
On December 15th, the Panamanian National Assembly proclaimed Noriega its maximum leader
and declared that Panama was in a state of war with the U.S.
The next night, near the Comandancia, four unarmed off-duty U.S. soldiers were stopped at a Panamanian roadblock.
In the confrontation that followed, a Marine lieutenant was shot and killed.
At the very same time that that was happening, there was an American Navy lieutenant and his wife
who had just been stopped ahead of these four officers.
General Mark Cisneros commanded all U.S. Army troops in Panama.
They took this American couple out, threw them up against the wall, sexually abused her,
fondled her and threatened her in many subtle ways of sexual abuse, threatened to kill him.
They kicked him in the groin a couple of times.
They blindfolded him, took him to one place and then to another place, and it was just a pure act of terrorism.
The next day at the White House, President Bush held a climactic meeting with his advisors.
One thing about the president is that he personalizes a lot of crises, and when they describe to him
the soldiers and the wife being tortured and beaten and I believe even raped or at least sexually abused,
it truly bothered the president.
George Bush wanted to get Noriega. This was not just a mission to liberate Panama,
but certainly one designed to get Noriega.
We threw everything but the kitchen sink into the Panama invasion.
And that's part of Powell's thinking on this.
And he's told the president this time and again,
if you're going to go in, go in whole hog, go in and do it right.
Don't go in halfway. And they didn't.
I was driving down the street and this was probably the 18th of December.
I was driving down the street, going towards a shopping mall to do some Christmas shopping for my family.
Lou Oliveira was an Army Ranger stationed at Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Washington.
And as I drove down, my pager went off, so I immediately called in and I reported,
and immediately the atmosphere was something other than what I'd ever experienced before.
It was very tense, very stressful.
We were told that it was real, that we were jumping into Panama, and we were going to war.
Frontline has obtained exclusive footage of the invasion taken by seven Air Force combat cameramen.
Oliveira was part of a force of 5,000 soldiers being assembled at five staging areas around the country.
They would join thousands more already stationed in Panama.
In Panama City, it had been another day of business as usual.
Shops were closing up, and Panamanians were on their way home from work.
Elizabeth Ramos, a 23-year-old engineering student, was looking forward to the holiday.
She told me, Mother, tomorrow when you go to the supermarket, bring some grapes and apples for Christmas.
I said OK, but I did not know that was the last thing she would say to me.
I did not think that I would never see her again.
At six o'clock that night, Noriega had just left a political rally.
Secret U.S. documents, based on debriefings of Noriega's bodyguard several days later,
revealed that Noriega was drinking heavily and disregarded warnings of a military action.
He believed that he was protected by the magical powers of witches.
Noriega's secret motorcade consisted of a four-door Hyundai, a Mercedes, and a Toyota Land Cruiser.
The Mercedes was a decoy to fool potential assassins.
Noriega rode in the Hyundai.
Despite the warnings of U.S. military movements, the bodyguard said Noriega was drunk and asleep in the car.
He came here to a military recreational center where a woman was brought to his room.
He told his bodyguards that he wanted to keep a low profile.
Around six p.m., my daughter Elizabeth called me, and she said to me,
Mother, I'm here at the university finishing up some work.
And she also said that she was going to go to the hospital to go see her sister Martha
and to stay there until she gave birth.
She called again at midnight and said, I'm here in the maternity ward.
Martha had a little girl, and now I'm going home.
Elizabeth Ramos then walked out to a bus stop.
It was now 15 minutes before the invasion was to begin.
Sergeant Lou Olivera and his men had been in a plane for the last seven hours.
And as I looked out, I saw the Tracers, the Tracer ground fire coming up from the ground,
hitting the aircraft in front of us, hitting our aircraft.
And I just popped my head back in and I said, they know we're coming, and get ready to jump.
And then I took my place in the door, and when the green light lit, I jumped.
US forces attacked targets all over Panama.
But the main point of the assault was the Comandancia.
It was hit from both the air and from the ground.
Okay, we got some fires running out there.
There's that number five right there.
It's burning good.
Straight rounds, straight rounds.
Everything was going as planned.
When we hit 4th of July Avenue, they had up a roadblock, and we got bogged down.
And that's when most of the bullets started flying.
And in front of my Tracers, like, two explosions.
Wham, wham.
And I'm like, oh, no.
So I thought it was like RPG fire coming from the Comandancia.
That's a small demonstration.
We ask you to surrender.
If you do not, we are prepared to level each and every building.
They were on top of us attacking everything that moved.
We could shoot at everything that moved, and the people were frightened.
We had never experienced anything like it.
People were looking for refuge.
I never feel so nervous in my life.
I put my soul and my spirit in the hand of the good Lord because I really believe it was the head.
I've seen pictures with Rambo and things like that.
But I never expect that I was going to live it.
There was an explosion.
The light went out.
All the windows shattered, and the ceiling fan fell down.
My wife thought the wall was going to fall on us.
My oldest daughter said, Mom, let us pray.
But my wife couldn't even say our father.
She couldn't even speak.
My daughter had to help her.
When the bombs began to explode, Noriega emerged from his room and asked what was happening.
His bodyguard told him that paratroopers were coming out of the sky and to get into the car.
But they had nowhere to go.
Despite their long-held fears of a possible kidnapping by the United States, they had nowhere to hide.
Noriega asked his bodyguard, what are we going to do?
That night, special U.S. operations units had been assigned to capture Noriega, but were unsuccessful.
We knew Noriega had been in Cologne.
We knew he had came back, but we just didn't know exactly where he was.
You have to conclude at any rate that there was something wrong that within Panama,
a place that we have been occupying since the turn of the century,
against a fellow that we have been watching for a long, long time,
that we couldn't put together an operation that would grab him.
Motherfucker.
Attention, attention.
It would be in vain to resist.
You have ten minutes to get rid of the weapons.
I remember thinking that because we're shooting like a red tracer, and they have green tracers on the AKs.
So we're sitting there moving back and forth and someone in my mind, I was thinking,
jeez, this looks like Star Wars.
In the midst of all this concentration of heat of battle, thinking, jeez, this looks like Star Wars.
The attack included the Air Force's secret stealth fighter bomber on its first flight into combat.
Its mission was to attack a barracks near the Rio-Ato airport
and stun one of Noriega's elite units stationed there.
Every service got a piece of the pie.
That's why you had the Air Force with the F-117 stealth bomber coming in there for a bombing mission.
Now the Air Force to this day insists that it was needed.
There are a lot of people in the Army who kind of chuckle to themselves on whether that was really the case.
Lou Olivera and his Rangers had jumped into Rio-Ato just after the stealth dropped its bombs.
But the defense forces had not been disabled.
The stealth had missed its target.
There were two Panamanians that ambushed me.
And they were about 10 feet away when they opened up with AK-47s on full automatic.
And it felt like someone, like Mike Tyson, had punched me in the chest as hard as he could.
And had physically, I remember hearing the audible sound of my breath coming out of my mouth.
And my feet just came out from underneath me.
They were coming through the jungle, coming through the bushes.
And as they walked up, I could hear them speak Spanish.
And they finally got to me and were talking above me, over the top of me.
And one of them kicked me in the side to see if I was still alive.
And I moaned or moved or some indication that I was still alive.
So he leveled his rifle point blank to my head and pulled the trigger.
And that's the last I remember.
In Panama City, Noriega wanted desperately to go back to the recreational center to retrieve a lucky charm which he believed held special powers.
But his bodyguard persuaded him it was impossible to return.
Eventually, they decided to go to the home of a Panamanian lieutenant.
There, Noriega called his mistress and several of his officers.
His calls to his headquarters, the Comandancia, went unanswered.
The footage you're looking at covers what remains of the Comandancia.
It is burning to the ground.
There's still sporadic fire coming out.
It's getting around the Comandancia.
Obviously, there are some diehards.
The building's burning. You know, a few times we had to move position because of falling buildings.
It was on fire. And people jumping out of windows and a lot of things.
When we left the building, I saw dead people.
The neighborhood was up in flames. I saw a car on fire with people inside.
There was water running in the street and burnt bodies. Burnt. There were many dead people burnt.
If the devil is in hell, I don't even think the devil would like to live the night of the 20th of December, 1989.
U.S. forces were finding it difficult to determine who was really the enemy,
because some Panamanian soldiers had changed into civilian clothes and continued to fight.
This truck was stopped with a volley of bullets.
Were they Noriega's soldiers or innocent civilians? It would take months to sort it out.
The bulk of the fighting was over in a matter of hours.
In Chorrios, the neighborhood surrounding the Comandancia, civilians were rounded up.
Most of the Panamanian defense forces had surrendered or run away.
Elizabeth Ramos had disappeared, and Noriega was still nowhere to be found.
I took this action only after reaching the conclusion that every other avenue was closed
and the lives of American citizens were in grave danger.
General Noriega is in hiding, and nevertheless, yesterday a dictator ruled Panama,
and today constitutionally elected leaders govern.
President Guillermo Endara and his two vice presidents had been sworn in on a U.S. military base,
but installing the elected government did not prevent most Latin American countries from condemning the U.S. invasion.
The legality is very dubious for a number of reasons.
Unlike the operation in the Gulf, Desert Storm, the invasion of Panama was not sanctioned by the United Nations,
nor was it sanctioned by the Organization of American States.
There was no international backing for it whatsoever, and in fact, after the invasion,
it was condemned in the United Nations by a substantial vote and an overwhelming vote, 20 to 1 in the OAS.
As daylight broke over Panama, U.S. soldiers began to relax.
You're studs. You're both studs. I hope you know that.
Yeah, that's us.
Prisoners continued to be rounded up.
What I want to try to do is find someone who's like a key communicator.
Also, here's something else we want to pitch. Who's the new president? Who was the president that these guys threw out?
The guy who was elected is now back in power.
The president, Ford?
No, not Ford.
Indara. Indara has been established as Presidente, and he's asked the PDF to surrender.
Okay, okay. Communicate.
Indara.
When troops entered Noriega's Comandancia, the barracks had been demolished.
U.S. soldiers were astonished at what they were finding.
Mementos of Hitler.
Five million dollars in cash.
And inside a voodoo doll full of pins, a picture of the president of Panama.
So here we are like in Noriega's, you know, like we're in his office and, you know, going through and you see all the arm room and stuff and they had like a lot better equipment than we did, you know.
And, you know, you're going through the office and you get kind of like a personal, like a view of like, well, what was this guy like?
And that's when you start, that's when all the porno tapes and all the alcohol and all the, like they had like kiddie magazines and stuff that, you know, just porn and just some sick stuff.
And then you go in there like frogs everywhere, like little statues of frogs.
He loved frogs or something.
And then he loved camouflage, just about everything he had that was camouflaged in some way.
His, the chairs around his conference table were camouflaged and it was just, it was kind of neat because like here you were, it gave you that feeling of like, you know, we succeeded because it ain't his no more, you know.
It's just, he's like had to leave all this stuff behind.
Churrios, the area surrounding the Comandancia, home to thousands of Panamanians, had been devastated.
Bodies lay openly in the street.
Many people were still missing.
My husband walked all the way to St. Thomas Hospital, but they never told us anything.
She just didn't appear.
We couldn't find her, couldn't find her alive or dead.
A total of 23 U.S. soldiers were killed during the invasion.
312 were wounded.
It was about noon the next day that I finally regained consciousness.
And I woke up and the first thing that ran through my mind was that I had fallen asleep.
And then I remembered back that I was in combat and, I mean, I'd remembered jumping in and all this stuff happening and I thought if I fell asleep, it was the wrong time to fall asleep.
I'm going to be in deep trouble.
Reinforcements arrived at Rio Ato and found Lou Olivera barely alive.
He was medevaced to a hospital where he recuperated from his wounds.
The bullet fired at his head had been deflected by a new Kevlar helmet and he sustained only a superficial wound.
I'm just a very lucky individual, I truly believe.
The day after the invasion, the first U.S. casualties were returned to Dover Air Force Base.
Lieutenant J.G. John Patrick Connors.
Petty Officer Isaac George Rodriguez III.
Your president grieves deeply for you.
Every human life is precious.
And yet I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it.
This operation is not over, but it's pretty well wrapped up.
But it wasn't wrapped up.
Sniper fire continued, primarily from Noriega's paramilitary forces known as the Dignity Battalion.
In some cases, troops needed to go house to house to suppress the gunfire.
Enemy resistance had been underestimated.
With the defense forces destroyed, there were no police left in Panama.
The stores throughout Panama City were destroyed by looters.
It was a serious and unexpected problem.
I never visualized that Panamanians would go to that level of looting.
I just didn't realize that there was that level of potential there to do that.
And I don't think anybody did.
I think if we had known that it was going to go to that,
we would have tried to bring in more troops earlier, to get into town earlier,
into the city and try to preclude it.
What do you think the people are going to do?
You know, they're going to go out and riot.
I mean, we have enough experience in our own country that when law and order breaks down
in a period of rioting, there's all sorts of looting goes on.
So why it should have surprised the American command, I'll never know.
Four days after the invasion, Noriega was still nowhere to be found.
But with his troops now totally defeated, he finally surfaced.
He arranged to meet a priest who hid him under a blanket in the backseat of his car,
and drove him here to seek asylum in the Vatican Embassy.
It was Christmas Eve.
I don't mean to croak on this, but it just turned out exactly what I knew Noriega was.
He was just a coward.
He was just trying to hide.
He was playing a big bluff, and that's how it turned out to be.
With Noriega now located, the U.S. soldiers could focus their full attention
on reestablishing law and order.
Noriega had armed much of the population to protect his regime.
In an effort to disarm the country, the U.S. offered cash for guns.
Tens of thousands were either turned in or confiscated in raids.
And in one of the very first acts by the new government,
a police force was quickly established.
In a controversial move, members of the Panamanian Defense Forces
were offered jobs as members of what would now be called the Public Force.
They went out on joint patrols with U.S. troops.
The men who had been loyal to the dictator Noriega just a week before
were now expected to protect the new democracy.
At the Vatican Embassy, the Army harassed Noriega by playing rock music.
Outside, the crowds called for his arrest,
while the isolated dictators slowly confronted the inevitable.
Finally, on the night of January 3rd, 15 days after the invasion,
Noriega walked out of the Vatican Embassy.
He surrendered to American troops who flew him out of Panama City to an Air Force base.
He was turned over to drug enforcement agents who put him on a plane for the United States.
He will stand trial in June for conspiring to smuggle drugs.
The same day Noriega surrendered,
the Ramos family found their first clue about what had happened to their daughter.
We found her 15 days later, 15 days after the invasion of Panama.
At the government office, they had a picture of her dead labeled unknown.
We didn't know where they had her. We didn't know where they had my daughter.
Was it all worth it?
I don't know how to answer that because I tell you, war is not a good thing.
You know, humanity having the ability that God has given us,
we should be able to solve things without conflict.
And so there's one element that pulls of me saying, you know, war is never worth it.
But on the other side, I feel that that could not have been solved in any other way.
And I feel that it was necessary.
One year ago, the people of Panama lived in fear under the thumb of a dictator.
Today, democracy is restored. Panama is free.
A year after the invasion, Panamanians celebrated another liberation,
their independence from Spain more than 150 years ago.
But Panamanians were still struggling to reconcile their contradictory feelings about the U.S. invasion.
We did a very in-depth journalistic study of what really was being felt by the population.
We definitely found a great majority of people considering it a liberation
and celebrating the fact that we had gotten rid of Noriega and so forth.
But the latest poll by Panama's largest newspaper also showed many Panamanians
believe that they are no better off today than under Noriega.
I began saying from the moment we returned that we should be very careful to
and very alert to this wound in our national psyche,
and that it would become more evident as time goes on.
As time goes on, people forget the tragedies of the Noriega regime
and are more conscious of the problems created by the invasion.
One of the deepest wounds of the invasion is the controversy over how many innocent civilians were killed.
Four months after the invasion, the debate was fueled when 123 bodies were exhumed from a mass grave in Panama City.
It was here that the Ramos family finally found their daughter.
God gave me the strength so that I could see my daughter for the last time.
We were there. We identified her body there in a plastic bag.
Just put into a plastic bag all those people thrown in there.
You don't even bury dogs that way.
Panamanian medical authorities say that unidentified bodies were buried
because the morgues did not have the capacity to keep them.
They put the total number of Panamanians killed at 321.
But the mass graves raised questions, and some families have sued the United States.
Jose Morin represents the Ramos family.
Panama was devastated in the invasion.
There are as many as perhaps 15 mass graves that exist throughout Panama
that U.S. soldiers buried people, men, women, and children in these mass graves.
And these mass graves still need to be uncovered, still need to be exhumed.
And the result being that many thousands may have died as a result of this invasion.
Richard Cabezas investigated the deaths for Panama's Medical Association.
These people who say that there are five or 2,000 dead simply tell a great lie
in order to make other people believe, but it is not true.
They do not have 5,000 names. They do not have 2,000 names.
Because there are not 2,000 relatives of these dead people.
If they existed, they would have already come forward to the human rights groups which exist in Panama.
Dr. Cabezas' investigation concluded that Elizabeth Ramos was killed by Noriega's Dignity Battalions.
Nevertheless, the Ramos family wants compensation from the United States.
I want President Bush to know of the great loss we've suffered here in Panama.
We lost our loved ones that had nothing to do with the problem that Noriega presented.
So far, none of the families who lost relatives has been compensated by the United States.
Robert White, former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, recently returned from Panama.
Assisting that there are only 200-plus civilian dead as a result of the invasion of an absurdly low figure,
we have encouraged nationalists in Panama to use this uncertainty to inflate the number of people killed
to weigh over 2,000, which is absurdly high.
But this is going to be a running sore and an irritant in U.S.-Panamanian relations for years and years to come.
And it's something we could put to rest by simple administrative competence and a few dollars spent.
A year after the invasion, the people of Chorrillos were still demonstrating for compensation for their homes which were destroyed.
Many of them still live here.
Fifteen months after the invasion, over 1,000 refugees are camped out inside a hangar with nothing but makeshift tents to call home.
The United States government has given aid for these victims, but they say it's not enough.
El Chorrillo, which was the damaged area where the General Headquarters of General Noriega was,
there's been an investment of approximately $36 to $38 million.
There's new buildings been already put up.
We have opened savings accounts for the people there that were hurt during the invasion for them to go and buy their own homes.
So it's about $38 million in that portion.
I've only been given $800, and that is nothing to compare with what I had in my home.
What I had in my home was more than a refrigerator. A refrigerator alone is worth $800.
The United States has promised a total aid package of $400 million for Panama's reconstruction.
Ambler Moss is a former U.S. Ambassador to Panama.
As I calculated today, only really about $100 million or a little bit more in real money has been transferred to Panama.
And I think that's a mistake.
When you consider that the U.S. economic sanctions against Noriega for two years brought the Panamanian economy down by probably about 25 percent,
and then there were the direct costs of the invasion, the people left homeless, all the damage,
that I think it's sort of a fundamental element of tort law that you should, to put it in plain language, clean up the mess that you make.
And frankly, even though $100 million is serious money,
it's not serious money compared with the terrible amount of need in Panama.
Public health problems, housing shortages, infrastructure problems, things that a private sector cannot possibly be expected to produce.
Panama is a country divided.
The rich, primarily lawyers, bankers, and high government officials, make up a small minority of the 2.3 million Panamanians.
It is the lower middle class and the poor who make up two-thirds of the country.
And public opinion polls indicate that they feel left out economically.
Unemployment is higher than under Noriega.
What I captured from my conversations with the government is that they're quite willing to accept an unemployment rate of 25 percent.
This is a real Reaganomics trickle-down kind of economic philosophy.
And I don't see that there are any economic policies designed to change that situation.
Panama today is still heavily armed.
A paranoia exists about security.
There are weapons everywhere.
We probably have the most fully armed civilian population of any country in the hemisphere.
And it's a direct result of the looting post-invasion, where people actually had to go out and protect their own homes,
added to the total lack of confidence in the police institutions.
The public lacks confidence in the 11,000-member police force, because 98 percent of them are former members of the Panamanian Defense Forces.
Obviously, this is something that the country does not want.
Every survey and every public opinion poll we have made, 70-plus percent of the population resents this, has no confidence in the public force.
As a consequence, the public force is not effective.
Vice President Ricardo Arias Calderón was responsible for the police force.
We've screened out, between the ranks of captain to general, almost 60 percent of all officers,
and have left none of the ranks of general, colonel, or lieutenant colonel.
Get him out of the way! Get him out of the way!
But just last December, this former colonel in the Defense Forces and ex-chief of police, Herrera Hassan, attempted a coup,
confirming Panamanians' worst fears, the police force did nothing to stop it, and American troops had to put down the coup.
I need some cover over here!
As a result, U.S. troops still patrol the streets of Panama today.
U.S. officials also remain concerned about the level of drug traffic through Panama.
According to a recent State Department report, drugs continue to be a problem despite increased efforts by Panamanian customs.
That's a good enough coke, probably about 80 percent.
Cocaine from neighboring Colombia is still smuggled in every conceivable fashion,
packaged in freight shipments, strapped on bodies, even swallowed.
We had one passenger, a 60-year-old Colombian, coming from Bogota, going into Miami,
and we picked him out and we started investigating, and finally he did mention he had swallowed 140.
When Rodrigo Erosimena was appointed to run Panamanian customs, he fired more than 200 people.
Almost 25 percent of his workforce was corrupt, but he says corruption still flourishes in other departments.
For example, customs turns its confiscated drugs over to the technical police to be destroyed,
but these are the same people who work for Noriega, and Erosimena believes that the drugs are stolen instead of being burned.
There is a big show, flames and all, but unfortunately, once it is burned, no one can really prove that what was burned was really drugs.
And there will always be doubt in my mind because the customs lab technician is not invited to verify the substance before it is burned.
Today, with Noriega gone, free enterprise flourishes in the drug industry.
So you have, instead of one chief entrepreneur, you've got 60 or 70 or 80 competing entrepreneurs.
The information that I have is that, indeed, the Panamanian ambassador to the United States corroborated
that there is more drug trafficking and more money laundering now than under Noriega.
The director of customs also says that many people arrested by his agents for smuggling drugs are simply let go.
According to the U.S. State Department, the Panamanian court system is in serious disarray.
Rogelio Cruz is the attorney general of Panama.
The problem is that only a few years ago, Panamanians have started to become interested in justice,
and that is why they now speak of justice being slow with the new democratic government.
But really, it's not just now. It's always been slow.
This government has now been in power 15 months, and it is truly shocking that in all that time,
not one drug trafficker, not one of those people who stole hundreds of millions of dollars,
has been brought to trial. Not one.
During Noriega's reign, one of the great attractions about Panama for drug dealers was the country's secretive banking system.
The regulation of those banks has changed little since the invasion.
A substantial portion of the income of Panama comes from the banking industry.
The only reason that banking industry exists is to serve as a haven for tax flight, drug money, etc.
The banks have increased their own deposits by $2.5 billion in 10 months.
As far as I can tell, and I'm the president of the banking commission, it's clean, honest, decent money.
But according to the U.S. government, $67 million of drug money was laundered through banks in Panama
in the year following the invasion.
Several banks are now under investigation, including Interbanco,
where President Andarov of Panama served on the board as secretary general.
When Dagoberto Franco, a reporter from the newspaper El Siglo,
wrote a column connecting Andarra to money laundering,
the president used an old Noriega law to sue him for libel, and then had the reporter thrown in jail.
This was for the Noriega regime a means of instilling terror, intimidation, repression.
And now it has been maintained by this government,
and proportionately it has been used more times under this government than during the Noriega regime.
Panamanian journalists confronted Andarra and demanded that the libel law be repealed.
Andarra ignored their petition and instead read the law aloud from the Constitution.
What's sad in this country is that they tell us that they're building a democracy, and yet they're jading journalists.
A government who feels threatened by journalists is a government who is against any type of freedom of expression.
President Andarra has resigned from Interbanco and the government has taken control of the bank,
but questions still linger about Andarra's part ownership and just how much the president really knew.
Andarra's behavior has damaged his credibility and the stability of his government.
Just yesterday he abruptly stripped part of his coalition, the Christian Democrats, of all power.
Instead of coming together, this government has disintegrated and has less and less support.
One of the most startling things that we encountered was the number of people who still support or have nostalgia for the party of Torrijos and Noriega.
And this, of course, is borne out by the recent elections where Noriega's party won a majority of the seats that were contested.
We must accept that they are amateurs at governance.
I mean, after you go 21 years of dictatorship, it's very hard to find anybody clean that has any experience in governance.
But we are starting to get impatient with their lack of efficiency.
We all complain about his lack of forcefulness and strength, yet if you scratch below the surface, what we really want is a weak president.
We're sick and tired after 21 years of strongmen, and that is Andarra's greatest advantage.
He doesn't constitute a threat, and that we like.
But for some observers, the real problem with Panama's fragile democracy lies not in the personal inadequacies of its leaders, but in the long shadow of American influence.
And this is, by the way, this contradiction about the present government.
They don't want an independent Panama.
They basically want a Panama that's subservient to the United States because that's how they have always prospered.
Whereas large numbers of the people of Panama really do have an authentic national spirit and think that what they have now is much more a facade of democracy rather than the real thing.
Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States!
By most accounts, the invasion of Panama gave President Bush and his advisors a new confidence that the United States could successfully use military force to achieve its foreign policy objectives.
And a year after the invasion of Panama, the United States went to war again to counter the outrageous acts of another dictator.
And as president, I can report to the nation, aggression is defeated, the war is over.
When was the last time you supposed that President Bush or Secretary of State Baker thought about Panama? I think it's history to them.
The Panamanians think about the U.S. invasion and its aftermath every day. It's a living reality for them.
Fifteen-month-old Elizabeth was born the night the United States invaded Panama.
She was named for her aunt, Elizabeth Ramos.
They want to say the 20th of December was a liberation, a just cause. But for who a just cause? What about the loved ones we lost that day?
Yes, we suffered through it. People were killed. But we're now living in daylight and we were living in a very dark night.
So I prefer to look at the future and say it has opened up a future for us. May God help us make it worthwhile.
In yesterday's power struggle, Arias Calderon was forced to relinquish all his major responsibilities as vice president of Panama.
The Panamanians think about the U.S. invasion and its aftermath every day.
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Did the 1980 Reagan campaign promise arms to Iran in exchange for a delay in the release of the hostages?
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